What I write after Joe and Henry go to bed

Old Miakka’s 103-year-old schoolhouse is a vestige of East County’s pioneering past. Two former pupils walk us down that dirt path.

If you head south on Verna Road, past a yawning canopy of mossy oak trees, past the dead-end of Fruitville, you’ll find yourself at the Old Miakka Schoolhouse.

This white clapboard building with its craggy screened porch, freshly burnished bell and rusty seesaw might stick out in other communities. But nestled among the pines in sleepy Old Miakka it makes perfect sense.

Like the residents of this East Sarasota settlement, the one-room schoolhouse harkens back to Florida’s oft forgotten pioneer days. At 1,700-square-foot, it is the community’s crown jewel, a testament to Old Florida’s southern grit and roots; tranquil and charming down to the wasps living in the eaves.

“When you walk in the ghosts say hey, and you say hey back,” says Becky Ayech, President of the Miakka Community Club. “The fact that it’s still standing, when everything else old in Sarasota County gets torn down exemplifies our community spirit.”

The air in Lakewood Ranch is thick with afternoon rain and stifling heat. Creatures everywhere are running for shelter. In The Lake Club, a luxury development east of Lorraine Road, residents are coming home from work, their wipers on high and their lights on low, steam rising up from the concrete. It’s 5:30 and everyone wants to be inside and dry, even the bees.

Bob Simons waits for a break between showers, steps out of his truck and into his bee garb. The ensemble is a cross between Hazmat suit and auto mechanic’s uniform: Dickies coveralls, white hood, requisite bee veil and goatskin gloves that don’t protect against stingers when they’re wet. He moves toward a four-foot-high bee box, a nondescript white dresser obscured by faux Tuscan scenery and a few rows of novelty grapevines. He lifts the lid. The bees come in drips and drabs.

“The girls aren’t too pissed,” he mutters through his veil. “I’m surprised. They don’t like rain or low-pressure weather.”

Like a dairy farmer talking about his cows, Simons refers to the bees as his girls, which is largely accurate. For every one male drone in the hive, there are 100 worker bees –– all of them female and none of them pleased about having their roof ripped off in the rain.

With the ease of an office worker pulling a manila folder out of a filing cabinet, Simons slides a hive frame out of the box and holds it out in front of him. The frame is dense with capped honeycomb in perfect hexagonal cells that took thousands of bees thousands of hours and thousands of flights to and from nearby wildflowers to collectively build. “Hold this,” he says, brushing off a few hangers-on. “You wont believe how heavy it is.”

When the going got tough at home, I escaped for three days into the East County wilderness with my kids.

Upon famously living life in the woods, Henry David Thoreau declared that he could never have enough of nature. “Heaven,” he wrote, “is under our feet as well as over our heads.” For his thoughts on solitude and his piercing insight on minimalism, Thoreau has always been my guiding star. A native Upstate New Yorker, I spent many cold nights sleeping in a tent in the woods, and I admit I’ve burned books to stay warm. “Walden” was never one of them.

But here’s the thing about Thoreau, the patron saint of daydreamers, loners and tree huggers: he never had kids. He never harangued his five-year-old for kissing the neighbor girl. He never yanked a dirty diaper out of his dog’s mouth, or used tweezers to pull paper out of his toddler’s ear canal. He never burned rice because he was fishing Legos out of the toilet, and he was never roused at 6 a.m. by a light saber blow to the face. Thoreau didn’t need to go to woods to find solace. He already had it. Trust me.

My life – once the bohemian, writerly existence of an adventurous 20-something – is now an endless chain of spilled cereal, pediatrician visits, time-outs, laundry, car vomit and drive-thru chicken. As the harried mother of two boys, ages five and one-and-a-half, I have come to recognize that in between the nuggets, vomit and time-outs, are beautiful, fleeting moments of peace. The pioneer woman in me has always believed that these rapturous flashes happen when I’m outside with my kids. Maybe it’s because I have feral boys. Maybe it’s because I’m feral myself. Maybe it’s because I’m sick of duct taping all the broken stuff in my house and gorging on Advil amid the cacophony. Whatever the impetus, I decided on a whim, during spring break, to take my kids tent camping (alone) in East Manatee County. My husband, after spending one maddening Saturday consoling our older son, Henry, after our younger son, Chip, bit his brother and leveled his pillow fort, gave his enthusiastic blessing. “You know what you’re doing,” he said. “Have fun.”

Oddities

Reading material

Me.

Joe.

Henry.

Chip.

Buzzy.

Why Lance?

This blog is named after my old friend Sarah's manifestation of a dreamy Wyoming cowboy named Lance, because the word blog sounds like something that comes out of a person's nose.

About me

I'm a journalist who spends my Mondays through Fridays writing other people's stories, a chronic procrastinator who needs structure. I once quit my job to write a book and like most writers, I made up excuses why I couldn't keep at it.

My boyfriendfiancé husband Joe likes to sleep in late on the weekends, but since we have a kid now that happens less than he'd like.

Before Henry and Chip, I used to spend my mornings browsing celebrity tabloid websites while our dog snored under the covers. Now I hide my computer in spots my feral children can't reach because everything I own is now broken, stained or peed on.

I created Lance in an attempt to better spend my free time. I thought it might jump start a second attempt at writing a novel.

It hasn't. And my free time is gone.

But I'm still here writing.

I'm 262728293031 323334 35 and I've yet to get caught up in something else, which is kind of a big deal for a chronic procrastinator.